computergeek92 wrote:

Wasn’t the performance difference between ATA100/133 and Sata150 not so big a deal?

Pretty much. It clearly shows up in benchmarks, but I doubt you would notice it when using a machine from that era. You will much more likely notice using a modern hard drive / SSD in such a machine.

For the most part, those drives used the same/similar internals, only differing by the interface. And drives were not capable of saturating 133MB/s or 150MB/s right away, so the common lower max speed of the drives was the determining factor, and if you're comparing two drives that are the same other than SATA vs PATA interface, it's a tie. 😀 The main improvements were in multi-drive systems, compared to the master/slave architecture (which only allowed one drive to be accessed at at time) and native command queuing, which helped more in high workload server applications. Some reports even say that NCQ slows down some applications because the command overhead is greater than the logic optimization for simple workloads.

How about benching with modern SSDs? like a current SATA 2-3 SSD in both the IDE ports (with an adapter) and the SATA Ports, also try different motherboards with different SATA and IDE controllers, like Intel ICH5, ICH6, ICH7, SiS and VIA southbridges, PCI SATA Controllers...

Carlos S. M. wrote:

How about benching with modern SSDs? like a current SATA 2-3 SSD in both the IDE ports (with an adapter) and the SATA Ports, also try different motherboards with different SATA and IDE controllers, like Intel ICH5, ICH6, ICH7, SiS and VIA southbridges, PCI SATA Controllers...

You will see the difference in throughput, but with a SSD, the main boost comes from the access time, not so much from the throughput.

But as clueless1 says, you get other benefits with SATA.

Unless if you have a newer sata 2 or 3 hdd you will not see much of a real world benefit of sata 1 over pata ata133.
Most sata 1 hdds are pata hdds with a sata controller. But you do benefit from a drive that pulls a little less power when idling (if the drive can use 3.3v) and a smaller data cable.

Keep in mind also that many SATA 1 implementations are on a conventional 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus, which prevents them from having any more bandwidth than ATA133 would have. To get past that you'd need a board whose southbridge has integrated SATA 1 support, not something that's using a discrete onboard chip (which will be on the PCI bus, thus no better than using a PCI card).
By the time chipsets started to integrate SATA support, SATA 2 took over pretty soon. Chipsets with integrated SATA 1 on a 150MB/sec capable link is a narrow time window, but it does include the Intel 865 and I think the nForce3. Not sure about VIA.

for me sata was a bit faster than my fastest pata, but the disks were not identical; i thought in the beginning sata was easier on the cpu, nit sure if that holds(i speak of standard ahci here)

shamino wrote:

Chipsets with integrated SATA 1 on a 150MB/sec capable link is a narrow time window, but it does include the Intel 865 and I think the nForce3. Not sure about VIA.

Technically, for Intel at that time, the SATA controller was in the Southbridge, so the relevant chip would be the ICH5 (which was paired with i865/i875 Northbridges). SATA1 integration continued with ICH6 (i915) and ICH7-M (i945PM/GM). The desktop version of ICH7 already had SATA2.

The nice things about the early SATA controllers was not so much the performance (contemporary hard drives were probably not capable to break even ATA-133), and not the features (they did not even support AHCI in these early days), but the fact that you could simply add more devices without having to share channels between hard drives and optical drives.

shamino wrote:

Keep in mind also that many SATA 1 implementations are on a conventional 32-bit 33MHz PCI bus, which prevents them from having any more bandwidth than ATA133 would have. To get past that you'd need a board whose southbridge has integrated SATA 1 support, not something that's using a discrete onboard chip (which will be on the PCI bus, thus no better than using a PCI card).
By the time chipsets started to integrate SATA support, SATA 2 took over pretty soon. Chipsets with integrated SATA 1 on a 150MB/sec capable link is a narrow time window, but it does include the Intel 865 and I think the nForce3. Not sure about VIA.

Chipsets with SATA 150 controller as i know are:
Intel 875P, all 865 and 848P
Intel 915 and 925 series
nForce 2 with MCP-S/MCP-RAID/MCP-Gb southbridge
nForce 3
nForce 4 and 4X
nForce 500
nForce3 Professional
All VIA Chipsets with the VT8237/A/R+ Southbridge
All SiS chipsets with the 964/965/966 (including variants) Southbridge
All ATI Chipsets with the SB300C, IXP210, IXP300/SB300, IXP320/SB320, IXP380/SB380 and IXP400/SB400 Southbridge
ULi M1689 Chipset
ULi M1695 Chipset

I threw together a 875P system a few days ago and have a Intel 320 SSD in it. It manages about 125MB/s read throughput. I think UDMA 133 tends to peak around 100MB/s.

But as Phil said, with SSDs it's mostly about the huge decrease in access time relative to hard disks. You can realize that benefit on any interface.

I've experimented a lot with nForce4 SATA II and its NCQ and with SSDs I still find it imperceptible. SSD access time is so fast already. It does benefit benchmarks of course though. Sometimes HDDs are actually slower with NCQ. Some drives don't have good firmware support for it.

Jade Falcon wrote:

Unless if you have a newer sata 2 or 3 hdd you will not see much of a real world benefit of sata 1 over pata ata133.
Most sata 1 hdds are pata hdds with a sata controller. But you do benefit from a drive that pulls a little less power when idling (if the drive can use 3.3v) and a smaller data cable.

Not even a sata 2 mechanical drive will saturate ATA133

Also NCQ is a SATA II thing and not supported with SATA 150 controllers

candle_86 wrote:

Not even a sata 2 mechanical drive will saturate ATA133

Modern ones do exceed SATA1 bus speeds, getting to almost 200MB/s in sequential R/W, although technically you can call them "SATA3 drives".

dr_st wrote:

candle_86 wrote:

Not even a sata 2 mechanical drive will saturate ATA133

Modern ones do exceed SATA1 bus speeds, getting to almost 200MB/s in sequential R/W, although technically you can call them "SATA3 drives".

SATA 3 drives are from 2011 and forward, SATA II was 2004-20012, and SATA 150 was 2002-2004. Most SATA 1 are actually ATA drives with a converter attached, while Mechanical drives didn't start to exceed 150mb/s until about 2013 and only then do they exceed it on small data sets that fit into the cache

candle_86 wrote:

Most SATA 1 are actually ATA drives with a converter attached, while Mechanical drives didn't start to exceed 150mb/s until about 2013 and only then do they exceed it on small data sets that fit into the cache

Well. my WD Caviar Green 1 TB seems to only saturate ATA66 at the best, about the older SATA HDDs, i made a picture about comparing bridged HDDs and native SATA HDDs, both HDDs are SATA1 (The bridged HDD is a Maxtor DiamondMax Plus 9 120 GB when the Native SATA HDD is a Seagate Barracuda 7200.7 160 GB SATA)

Carlos S. M. wrote:

Chipsets with SATA 150 controller as i know are: Intel 875P, all 865 and 848P Intel 915 and 925 series nForce 2 with MCP-S/MCP-R […]
Show full quote

Chipsets with SATA 150 controller as i know are:
Intel 875P, all 865 and 848P
Intel 915 and 925 series
nForce 2 with MCP-S/MCP-RAID/MCP-Gb southbridge
nForce 3
nForce 4 and 4X
nForce 500
nForce3 Professional
All VIA Chipsets with the VT8237/A/R+ Southbridge
All SiS chipsets with the 964/965/966 (including variants) Southbridge
All ATI Chipsets with the SB300C, IXP210, IXP300/SB300, IXP320/SB320, IXP380/SB380 and IXP400/SB400 Southbridge
ULi M1689 Chipset
ULi M1695 Chipset

nForce2 southbridges don't have integrated SATA, those boards get SATA from a discrete controller on PCI. They do have integrated ATA133 however, so I think ATA is preferable to use with that chipset since it bypasses the PCI bus and leaves it available for other things. I would have the same preference when dealing with any chipset/motherboard arrangement where SATA uses PCI but ATA doesn't.

nForce4 is SATA 2, so by that time it's no contest anymore. Can't comment on the others, but I agree at least with nForce3 and the 865/875/915/925 being integrated SATA 1.

shamino wrote:

Carlos S. M. wrote:

Chipsets with SATA 150 controller as i know are: Intel 875P, all 865 and 848P Intel 915 and 925 series nForce 2 with MCP-S/MCP-R […]
Show full quote

Chipsets with SATA 150 controller as i know are:
Intel 875P, all 865 and 848P
Intel 915 and 925 series
nForce 2 with MCP-S/MCP-RAID/MCP-Gb southbridge
nForce 3
nForce 4 and 4X
nForce 500
nForce3 Professional
All VIA Chipsets with the VT8237/A/R+ Southbridge
All SiS chipsets with the 964/965/966 (including variants) Southbridge
All ATI Chipsets with the SB300C, IXP210, IXP300/SB300, IXP320/SB320, IXP380/SB380 and IXP400/SB400 Southbridge
ULi M1689 Chipset
ULi M1695 Chipset

nForce2 southbridges don't have integrated SATA, those boards get SATA from a discrete controller on PCI. They do have integrated ATA133 however, so I think ATA is preferable to use with that chipset since it bypasses the PCI bus and leaves it available for other things. I would have the same preference when dealing with any chipset/motherboard arrangement where SATA uses PCI but ATA doesn't.

nForce4 is SATA 2, so by that time it's no contest anymore. Can't comment on the others, but I agree at least with nForce3 and the 865/875/915/925 being integrated SATA 1.

Some nForce2 southbridges like MCP-S did support SATA (Remember nForce2 had 5 different southbridge variants which only 3 variants had SATA controllers). I did research on that when i made the list. You can find nForce 2 boards with SATA ports provied by the southbridge like the Gigabyte GA-7N400S. The original nForce 4 and the 4X varaint had only SATA 150 support. All other and newer nForce 4 variants featured SATA II

candle_86 wrote:

Not even a sata 2 mechanical drive will saturate ATA133.

two words.
Veloci Raptor.

There's not much in it. You're right in an absolute sense, but it's not like the interface would shave much off the top.
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_ … ciraptor_review

gdjacobs wrote:

There's not much in it. You're right in an absolute sense, but it's not like the interface would shave much off the top.
http://www.storagereview.com/western_digital_ … ciraptor_review

That 600GB model reviewed has 200GB platters. My Velociraptor has 250GB platters with corresponding faster transfer rates:

Results are in WinXP on a D946GZIS with SATA2 (300MB/sec) interface.